Frank Zhu had only been at his job with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for about six weeks but could already see himself making a career out of it.
Zhu was then blindsided in the middle of a work call when he received an email saying he was terminated from his role on Feb. 14. As a Chicago-based financial analyst in HUD’s Office of Public Housing, Zhu provided guidance to public housing authorities related to their financial health, including their use of federal dollars.
“I was very disturbed and horrified and, above all, livid,” Zhu said, who said he took a pay cut to join HUD.
Zhu is one of at least 20 employees in HUD’s American Federation of Government Employees Local 911 union, which includes workers in Chicago, Columbus and Cleveland, Ohio, and workers stationed in the area from HUD’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., who recently received termination notices as part of President Donald Trump’s administration’s efforts to cull the federal workforce to reduce spending.
A dozen of these employees received termination notices Monday, effective March 28, and work in the local Office of Field Policy and Management, according to a national reduction in force notice sent to Local 911. This will wipe out the entire local department apart from managers, the union said. These employees are tasked with communicating with the public, receiving hundreds of calls and visits daily, the union said. They also handle public records requests and are the intermediaries between HUD, elected officials and external stakeholders.
These 20 workers were probationary employees across various HUD departments. Probationary employees are new hires or people starting new positions within a federal agency, a status typically lasting one to two years.
HUD did not respond to a Tribune request for comment.
HUD Secretary Scott Turner announced in a video on social media Feb. 13 that a task force from billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency had launched at HUD.
“With the help of DOGE, we will identify and eliminate all waste, fraud and abuse,” said Turner, a former NFL player, in the video, adding that $260 million in savings had already been identified. National news outlets have challenged some of the Trump administration’s reported billions of dollars in savings.
That same week, a document circulated among HUD workers that was reported on by national news outlets and obtained by the Tribune showing HUD’s workforce could be halved. It indicates the total agency headcount at about 8,300 as of Jan. 21, with some departments slated for more drastic staff reductions than others.
Prior to the terminations, AFGE’s Local 911 represented 512 employees, 406 of which were in the Chicago field office.
Veronica Bobbitt, president of Local 911, said it has been hard to get information about staffing cuts from management.
Antonio Gaines, president of AFGE’s National Council 222, the group that represents 40 local HUD unions nationwide, said his organization has repeatedly requested to meet with the new administration’s transition team without success. He said he has also reached out to members of Congress and is pursuing legal actions.
“We are exhausting all available resources to try to push back against these efforts,” Gaines said.
Bobbitt said that while probationary employees do have fewer workplace protections, they are still being wrongly terminated. For the latest reduction in force notice, she said management did not conduct a retention and seniority report to determine who to lay off based on the newest employees and instead just “arbitrarily” terminated workers and did so without providing the proper document for these workers to apply for Illinois unemployment benefits.
Terminated employees who spoke with the Tribune fear their work will now not get done or remaining team members who already have full plates will have to shoulder the burden. They say that while these cuts were done in an effort to make the government more efficient, it will do the opposite.
Gabrielle Cole was another Chicago-based probationary employee who recently lost her job in HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity. In her role, she was primarily focused on fair housing investigations that looked into how systemic issues such as redlining continue to negatively affect certain groups of people and their housing choices.
She said she does not think her work will get done as the department was already “slightly” understaffed. Cole said they had a “ginormous” backlog of complaints.
“It had been all hands on deck the past months,” Cole said. “We were doing a really good job of getting that down. There have been more fair housing complaints than ever before in the last two years, probably the most there have ever been.”
A current Chicago-based staffer in the same office as Cole who spoke on the condition of anonymity given that he is still employed with the agency confirmed that his office has already struggled with inadequate staffing levels to handle the large volume of complaints that Cole cited. They receive complaints alleging discrimination under the Fair Housing Act and, as of 2023, the Violence Against Women Act, for victims of domestic violence who face housing discrimination as a result. The office spent the past year, he said, working through a backlog in the thousands.
The terminations will and the proposed cuts would “cripple our ability to do our job,” he said.
Bobbitt said five attorneys were included in the probationary cuts Feb. 14. She said these workers ensure closings for Federal Housing Administration loans, litigate “program-specific issues such as below-standard physical inspections and unsafe living conditions for all subsidized properties in our region” and facilitate in-house legal matters such as union grievances and reasonable accommodation requests from staff. Bobbitt thinks the administration is intentionally gutting the legal office to “ensure that the union’s contract is not upheld” because there will not be enough staff to meet the needs.
Gaines said that on top of the terminations, about 600 HUD employees nationwide took the buyout offer.
Dan Burke, HUD’s former Chicago-based director of the multifamily division for the Midwest region who retired in 2023, said if the 50% reduction in force ends up materializing for HUD, the life of residents and communities in Chicago and around the country will be “devastated.”
“It will be the case that needed funding and needed services will not be delivered to very low income people,” Burke said. “The workload is so substantial that no matter how they cut the staffing in terms of which divisions, there is just too much work to be done.”
Jayna Lennon worked out of HUD’s Illinois field office based in Chicago and was in a meeting about HUD’s new mandatory in-office work policy when she received her termination notice; she turned to her supervisor and they excused themselves from the meeting.
“It was so jarring,” Lennon said, who cried “a lot” that day.
Lennon worked in the field policy office that she described as the “front door of HUD.” When residents, congressional delegations, local governments, homeless organizations and others have questions about the agency and its resources, Lennon was one of the workers to help guide them to the answers. She estimates that in her roughly one year at HUD, she spoke with more than 1,500 residents, referring them to various agency resources. She said her team had a heavy workload.
As a younger employee, it was “really exciting” to come into this line of work. Lennon said everyone she worked with at HUD was “so passionate and so motivated and made me fall in love with the housing field.” But, she said, she is now “cut off” during a time when there is an escalating housing crisis.
“It is critical that people are coordinating the resources that are out there and that everybody is moving in the same direction,” Lennon said, “ … (to) incrementally make this problem better … and it is hard to see how the problem isn’t going to continue to get worse now.”
